She is not herself: The deviant relations of Alien Resurrection

Screen

Volumn 44, Issue 3, 2003, Pages 251-276

  Stacey, Jackie ^a  

^a NONE

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 33749427783     PISSN: 00369543     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/screen/44.3.251     Document Type: Article

References (63)

1. Debbora Battaglia, 'Multiplicities: an anthropologist's thoughts on replicants and clones in popular film', Critical Inquiry, vol. 27, no. 3 (2001), pp. 493-515, p. 496, (emphasis in original)
2. Battaglia's excellent paper on human replication in popular cinema focuses particularly on the film Multiplicity (Harold Ramis, 1987)
3. Elizabeth Grosz, 'Freaks', Social Semiotics, vol. 1 no. 2 (1991), pp. 22-33, p. 36
4. For a more general discussion of 'the proliferation of sameness' in relation to the shift from reproduction to replication in the context of cloning, see Susan Squier, 'Negotiating boundaries: from assisted reproduction to assisted replication', in E. Ann Kaplan and Susan Squier (eds), Playing Dolly: Technocultural Formations, Fantasies and Fictions of Assisted Reproduction (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1999), pp. 101-15
5. Barbara Creed, The Monstrous Feminine: Film, Feminism and Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 1993)
6. Catherine Constable, 'Becoming the monster's mother morphologies of identity in the Alien series', in Annette Kuhn (ed.), Alien Zone II: the Spaces of Science Fiction Cinema (London: Verso, 1999), pp. 173-202
7. The cultural significance of the kinds of monstrous bodies that populate alien films have been widely debated. See, in particular, James Kavanagh, 'Feminism, humanism and science in Alien', and Judith Newton, 'Feminism and anxiety in Alien', in Annette Kuhn (ed.), Alien Zone: Cultural Theory and Contemporary Science Fiction Cinema (London: Verso, 1990), pp. 73-81, 82-90
8. Constance Penley, Time travel, primal scene and the critical dystopia', in Constance Penley, Elisabeth Lyon, Lynn Spigel and Janet Bergstrom (eds), Close Encounters: Film, Feminism and Science Fiction (Minneapolis, MN and Oxford: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), pp. 63-82
9. Kelly Hurley, 'Reading like an alien: posthuman identity in Ridley Scott's Alien and David Cronenberg's Rabid, in Judith Halberstam and Ira Livingston (eds), Posthuman Bodies (Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 1995), pp. 216-20
10. Elizabeth Hills, 'From "figurative males" to action heroines: further thoughts on active women in the cinema', Screen, vol. 40, no. 1 (1999), pp. 38-51
11. Pamela Church Gibson '"You've been in my life so long I can't remember anything else": into the labyrinth with Ripley and the alien', in Matthew Tinkcom and Amy Villarejo (eds), Keyframes: Popular Cinema and Cultural Studies (London: Routledge, 2001), pp. 35-51
12. Rosi Braidotti, Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming (Cambridge: Polity, 2002)
13. For a discussion of the cultural significance of the pixel, see Sarah Franklin, Celia Lury and Jackie Stacey, Global Nature, Global Culture (London: Sage, 2000), pp. 60-66
14. Braidotti, Metamorphoses, p. 179
15. Melinda Cooper, 'Regenerative medicine: stem cells and the science of monstrosity', unpublished paper (2002), p. 10. This paper offers a fascinating discussion of the history of the scientific study of teratomas in relation to the development of contemporary stem cell research, looking in particular at the history of the conceptualization of the normal and the pathological in teratology and teratogeny
16. In a woman, a teratoma may imitate pregnancy in so far as it has the capacity to produce the cells of all the different organs in the body. Thus, unlike many tumours, teratomas have a fascinating and yet grotesque characteristic of foetal resemblance. This is why teratomas are also called 'monstrous births'. For a more detailed discussion of teratomas, see Jackie Stacey, Teratologies: a Cultural Study of Cancer (London: Routledge, 1997)
17. As Rosi Braidotti has shown in Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Thought (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1994), teratology, or the scientific study of monsters, was the forerunner of contemporary embryology
18. This argument is developed in Kaja Silverman's reading of Blade Runner, 'Back to the future', in Camera Obscura, no. 27 (1991), p. 115
19. For a comprehensive analysis of this film, see Scott Bukatman, Blade Runner (London: British Film Institute, 1997)
20. Harold Varmus and Robert A. Weinberg. Genes and the Biology of Cancer (New York, NY: The Scientific American Library, 1993), p. 29
21. For important analyses of popular cultural constructions of the gene, see Dorothy Nelkin and M. Susan Lindee, The DNA Mystique: the Gene as a Cultural Icon (New York, NY: W.H. Freeman and Company, 1995)
22. Jon Turney, Frankenstein's Footsteps: Science, Genetics and Popular Culture (New Haven, NJ and London: Yale University Press, 1998)
23. José van Dijck, Imagenation: Popular Images of Genetics (New York, NY: New York University Press, 1998)
24. The term 'the new genetic imaginary' is taken from Sarah Franklin's chapter 'Life itself, in Franklin et al., Global Nature, Global Culture, pp. 188-277
25. For a discussion of images of the 'helping hand' of science in new genetic interventions, see Sarah Franklin, 'Flat life: conception after Dolly', paper delivered at the 'Biotechnology, Philosophy and Sex' Conference, 12 October 2002, Ljubljana, Slovenia
26. Nelkin and Lindee, The DNA Mystique, p. 2
27. Sarah Kember, 'Feminism, technology and representation', in James Curran, David Morley and Valerie Walkerdine (eds). Cultural Studies and Communication (London: Edward Arnold, 1996), pp. 229-47
28. Donna Haraway, Primate Visions: Gender, Race and Nature in the World of Modern Science (London: Routledge, 1989), p. 368
29. J.P. Telotte, 'The double of fantasy and the space of desire', in Kuhn (ed.), Alien Zone, p. 154
30. Mary Ann Doane, 'Technophilia: technology, representation and the feminine', in Mary Jacobus, Eveleyn Fox Keller and Sally Shuttleworth (eds), Body/Politics: Women and the Discourse of Science (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 170
31. Philip Brophy, 'Horrality - the textuality of contemporary horror films', Screen, vol. 27, no. 1 (1986), pp. 2-13, p. 10
32. Pete Boss, 'Vile bodies and bad medicine', Screen, vol. 27, no. 1 (1986), pp. 14-25, p. 18
33. Creed, The Monstrous Feminine
34. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: an Essay on Abjection (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1982)
35. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 4
36. Debbora Battaglia points out that the advertising slogan of the Tyrell Corporation (the company that produced the replicants in Blade Runner) is 'More Human than the Humans'. Battaglia, 'Multiplicities', p. 507
37. On the human/replicant relation, see also Silverman, 'Back to the future', pp. 113-15
38. Battaglia, 'Multiplicities', p. 509
39. Constable, 'Becoming the monster's mother', p. 190
40. For a discussion of the incestuous character of the complex forms of desire between Ripley and the various aliens in the film, see Church Gibson, '"You've been in my life so long I can't remember anything else"', p. 49
41. For a discussion of the commodification of memory in science fiction films, see Bukatman, Blade Runner, pp. 77-80
42. See Christine Battersby, The Phenomenal Woman. Feminist Metaphysics and the Patterns of Identity (Cambridge: Polity, 1998)
43. Claudia Springer, Electronic Eros: Bodies and Desire in the Postindustrial Age (London: Athlone Press, 1996), p. 61
44. Judith Butler Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 136
45. For further discussion of action heroines, see Carol Clover, Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (London: British Film Institute, 1992)
46. Yvonne Tasker, Spectacular Bodies: Gender, Genre and the Action Cinema (London: Routledge, 1993) and Working Girls: Gender and Sexuality in Popular Cinema (London: Routledge, 1998)
47. Ros Jennings, 'Desire and design: Ripley undressed', in Tamsin Wilton (ed.), Immortal, Invisible: Lesbians and the Moving Image (London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 193-206
48. Chris Holmlund, Impossible Bodies: Femininity and Masculinity at the Movies (London: Routledge, 2002)
49. Film Review, December 1997, p. 35
50. For an analysis of Michael Jackson in this video, see Kobena Mercer, 'Monster metaphors: notes on Michael Jackson's "Thriller"', Screen, vol. 27, no 1 (1986), p. 27
51. For an analysis of androgyny and sexuality in science fiction films, see Janet Bergstrom, 'Androids and androgyny, in Penley et al. (eds), Close Encounters: Film, Feminism and Science Fiction, pp. 33-62
52. Film Review, p. 33
53. For a discussion of gay male cloning cultures, Battaglia references John Lauritsen, 'Political-economic construction of gay male cloning identity', Journal of Homosexuality, vol. 24, nos 3/4 (1993), pp. 221-32
54. Springer, Electronic Eros, p. 61
55. For a discussion of the sexualized use of hands in lesbian films, see Mandy Merck, 'The lesbian hand', in In Your Face: 9 Sexual Studies (New York, NY: New York University Press, 2000), pp. 124-47
56. For an analysis of the posthuman, see Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1999)
57. and Philip K. Dick's Ubik' (2002)
58. This work is drawn from his PhD in progress: 'Spiders from Mars: refiguring subjectivity in the novels of Philip K. Dick, 1953-66', Stockholm University, Sweden
59. See also Hurley, 'Reading like an alien'
60. Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, p. 1
61. For a discussion of the remaking of 'life itself in the context of the new genetics, see Sarah Franklin, in Franklin et al., Global Nature, pp. 188-227
62. I am grateful to Imogen Tyler for discussions on these points. For an analysis of the disruptions to psychoanalytic categories produced by pregnant embodiment, see her chapter 'Skin-tight: celebrity, pregnancy and subjectivity', in Sara Ahmed and Jackie Stacey (eds), Thinking Through the Skin (London: Routledge, 2001), pp. 69-84
63. For an excellent historical account see Hillel Schwarz, The Culture of the Copy (New York, NY: Zone Books, 1996)